QuoteA Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that ...recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.

A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

...Four of the officials said the approach outlined in the June strategy paper was a broadening of an effort the Putin administration launched in March 2016. That month the Kremlin instructed state-backed media outlets, including international platforms Russia Today and Sputnik news agency, to start producing positive reports on Trump’s quest for the U.S. presidency, the officials said.

Five of the U.S. officials described the institute as the Kremlin’s in-house foreign policy think tank.

Not enough for ya? How about this?

QuoteThe officials said the [DNC] hacking was a covert intelligence operation run separately out of the Kremlin.

The overt propaganda and covert hacking efforts reinforced each other, according to the officials. Both Russia Today and Sputnik heavily promoted the release of the hacked Democratic Party emails, which often contained embarrassing details.

Quotegabester
No. It's obviously the DNC's fault for promoting a deeply flawed candidate instead of accepting the will of a minority of the people supporting someone who wasn't even a registered Democrat.

They shouldn't have run a woman after a minority.
They shouldn't have run that woman because of emails.

Quotegabester
No. It's obviously the DNC's fault for promoting a deeply flawed candidate instead of accepting the will of a minority of the people supporting someone who wasn't even a registered Democrat.

They shouldn't have run a woman after a minority.
They shouldn't have run that woman because of emails.

Finally, someone that gets it!

What I can't figure out is how to pre-emptively astroturf the trolls. That would really be something.

Trump Resign! Lock Them Up!

I suspect it's only a matter of time before one of the US' allies decides to take matters into their own hand and eliminate the ManchurianSiberian president.

Quotepdq
If this story didn't come from Reuters, I'd probably dismiss it,

ie ....as it's It is all everybody else's fault, Clinton had nothing to do with it
Point fingers everywhere else but at yourself....

Sure you would, you litany of excuse laden threads has no equal....

Quotegabester
No. It's obviously the DNC's fault for promoting a deeply flawed candidate instead of accepting the will of a minority of the people supporting someone who wasn't even a registered Democrat.

They shouldn't have run a woman after a minority.
They shouldn't have run that woman because of emails.

Quoteeven some of her close friends and advisers think that Clinton “bears the blame for her defeat,” arguing that her actions before the campaign (setting up a private email server, becoming entangled in the Clinton Foundation, giving speeches to Wall Street banks) “hamstrung her own chances so badly that she couldn’t recover,” ensuring that she could not “cast herself as anything but a lifelong insider when so much of the country had lost faith in its institutions.”

Allen and Parnes are the authors of a 2014 book, “H R C,” a largely sympathetic portrait of Clinton’s years as secretary of state, and this book reflects their access to longtime residents of Clinton’s circle. They interviewed more than a hundred sources on background — with the promise that none of the material they gathered would appear before the election — and while it’s clear that some of these people are spinning blame retroactively, many are surprisingly candid about the frustrations they experienced during the campaign.

“Shattered” underscores Clinton’s difficulty in articulating a rationale for her campaign (other than that she was not Donald Trump). And it suggests that a tendency to value loyalty over competence resulted in a lumbering, bureaucratic operation in which staff members were reluctant to speak truth to power, and competing tribes sowed “confusion, angst and infighting.”

Despite years of post-mortems, the authors observe, Clinton’s management style hadn’t really changed since her 2008 loss of the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama: Her team’s convoluted power structure “encouraged the denizens of Hillaryland to care more about their standing with her, or their future job opportunities, than getting her elected.”

Photo

Hillary Clinton, right, with her aide Huma Abedin talking on her campaign plane in October 2016. “Shattered” describes a presidential campaign that turned a winnable election into a devastating loss. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
The campaign frequently spun its wheels in response to crises and urgent appeals from Democrats on both the state and national levels, the authors report. Big speeches were written by committee. “Evolving the core message” remained a continuing struggle. And the Brooklyn campaign headquarters — which would end up outspending Trump’s campaign by nearly 2 to 1 .....

Robby Mook — who centered the Clinton operation on data analytics (information about voters, given to him by number crunchers) as opposed to more old-fashioned methods of polling, knocking on doors and trying to persuade undecideds — made one strategic mistake after another, but was kept on by Clinton, despite her own misgivings.

“Mook had made the near-fatal mistakes of underestimating Sanders and investing almost nothing early in the back end of the primary calendar,” Parnes and Allen write, and the campaign seemed to learn little from Clinton’s early struggles. For instance, her loss in the Michigan primary in March highlighted the problems that would pursue her in the general election — populism was on the rise in the Rust Belt, and she was not connecting with working-class white voters — and yet it resulted in few palpable adjustments. Michigan, the authors add, also pointed up Mook’s failure to put enough organizers on the ground, and revealed that his data was a little too rosy, “meaning the campaign didn’t know Bernie was ahead.”

These problems were not corrected in the race against Trump. Allen and Parnes report that Donna Brazile, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, was worried in early October about the lack of ground forces in major swing states, and that Mook had “declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign,” despite pleas from advisers in crucial states.

After a planned appearance in Green Bay with President Obama was postponed, the authors write, Clinton never set foot in Wisconsin, a key state. In fact, they suggest, the campaign tended to take battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan (the very states that would help hand the presidency to Trump) for granted until it was too late, and instead looked at expanding the electoral map beyond Democratic-held turf and traditional swing states to places like Arizona.

But you boys keep the faith, it could not be Clinton's fault, nor could you ever be so wrong as you are, again and again.....

Quotepdq
If this story didn't come from Reuters, I'd probably dismiss it,

ie ....as it's It is all everybody else's fault, Clinton had nothing to do with it
Point fingers everywhere else but at yourself....

Sure you would, you litany of excuse laden threads has no equal....

Quotegabester
No. It's obviously the DNC's fault for promoting a deeply flawed candidate instead of accepting the will of a minority of the people supporting someone who wasn't even a registered Democrat.

They shouldn't have run a woman after a minority.
They shouldn't have run that woman because of emails.

Quoteeven some of her close friends and advisers think that Clinton “bears the blame for her defeat,” arguing that her actions before the campaign (setting up a private email server, becoming entangled in the Clinton Foundation, giving speeches to Wall Street banks) “hamstrung her own chances so badly that she couldn’t recover,” ensuring that she could not “cast herself as anything but a lifelong insider when so much of the country had lost faith in its institutions.”

Allen and Parnes are the authors of a 2014 book, “H R C,” a largely sympathetic portrait of Clinton’s years as secretary of state, and this book reflects their access to longtime residents of Clinton’s circle. They interviewed more than a hundred sources on background — with the promise that none of the material they gathered would appear before the election — and while it’s clear that some of these people are spinning blame retroactively, many are surprisingly candid about the frustrations they experienced during the campaign.

“Shattered” underscores Clinton’s difficulty in articulating a rationale for her campaign (other than that she was not Donald Trump). And it suggests that a tendency to value loyalty over competence resulted in a lumbering, bureaucratic operation in which staff members were reluctant to speak truth to power, and competing tribes sowed “confusion, angst and infighting.”

Despite years of post-mortems, the authors observe, Clinton’s management style hadn’t really changed since her 2008 loss of the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama: Her team’s convoluted power structure “encouraged the denizens of Hillaryland to care more about their standing with her, or their future job opportunities, than getting her elected.”

Photo

Hillary Clinton, right, with her aide Huma Abedin talking on her campaign plane in October 2016. “Shattered” describes a presidential campaign that turned a winnable election into a devastating loss. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
The campaign frequently spun its wheels in response to crises and urgent appeals from Democrats on both the state and national levels, the authors report. Big speeches were written by committee. “Evolving the core message” remained a continuing struggle. And the Brooklyn campaign headquarters — which would end up outspending Trump’s campaign by nearly 2 to 1 .....

Robby Mook — who centered the Clinton operation on data analytics (information about voters, given to him by number crunchers) as opposed to more old-fashioned methods of polling, knocking on doors and trying to persuade undecideds — made one strategic mistake after another, but was kept on by Clinton, despite her own misgivings.

“Mook had made the near-fatal mistakes of underestimating Sanders and investing almost nothing early in the back end of the primary calendar,” Parnes and Allen write, and the campaign seemed to learn little from Clinton’s early struggles. For instance, her loss in the Michigan primary in March highlighted the problems that would pursue her in the general election — populism was on the rise in the Rust Belt, and she was not connecting with working-class white voters — and yet it resulted in few palpable adjustments. Michigan, the authors add, also pointed up Mook’s failure to put enough organizers on the ground, and revealed that his data was a little too rosy, “meaning the campaign didn’t know Bernie was ahead.”

These problems were not corrected in the race against Trump. Allen and Parnes report that Donna Brazile, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, was worried in early October about the lack of ground forces in major swing states, and that Mook had “declined to use pollsters to track voter preferences in the final three weeks of the campaign,” despite pleas from advisers in crucial states.

After a planned appearance in Green Bay with President Obama was postponed, the authors write, Clinton never set foot in Wisconsin, a key state. In fact, they suggest, the campaign tended to take battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan (the very states that would help hand the presidency to Trump) for granted until it was too late, and instead looked at expanding the electoral map beyond Democratic-held turf and traditional swing states to places like Arizona.

But you boys keep the faith, it could not be Clinton's fault, nor could you ever be so wrong as you are, again and again.....

You continually miss the point. A foreign government took significant steps to influence our election. Don't let your hate for HRC give that a pass. It's unacceptable. Period. Whether or not people voted differently due to the influence is not relevant. Except for the whole voter roll theft, Cambridge Analytica, Russian bank thing. Why do you think Trump went to those states and PA? Keep your head in the sand.

reported in September 2016:
In late June an "unknown actor scanned a state's Board of Election website for vulnerabilities" and, after identifying a security gap, exploited the vulnerability to conduct a "data exfiltration," or unauthorized data transfer, the FBI said in a recent bulletin.

Then in August, hackers used the same vulnerability in an "attempted intrusion activities into another state's Board of Election system," the FBI said.

"The prospect of a hostile government actively seeking to undermine our free and fair elections represents one of the gravest threats to our democracy since the Cold War,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, , D-Nev., wrote in a recent letter to Comey.

Asked this summer why Russia might be trying to undermine the U.S. political process, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Russian President Vladimir Putin is "paranoid" about the potential for revolutions in Russia, "and of course they see a U.S. conspiracy behind every bush, and ascribe far more impact than we’re actually guilty of."

"They believe we’re trying to influence political developments in Russia, we’re trying to affect change, and so their natural response is to retaliate and do unto us as they think we've done to them," he said.

The depth of Clinton hatred may never be fully plumbed...or sated*. I suspect they'll still be pumping out hate pieces about her after she's dead and gone.

However, here, in the real world, one could easily make a court case out of the Trump/Russia episode, if it were, say, a murder. We have the motive and connection: after his many bankruptcies and the real estate crash in 2009, literally no US bank would loan to Trump any more...but certain foreign banks would...and did. We have the (fake news and hacking) weapon, how it was used and who pulled the trigger(s)...and now we (apparently) have the (written!) plan laying it all out.

Unfortunately, it's not a murder, but rather the possible theft of a US presidential election. How do you find justice there, short of impeachment, which the Republicans would never let happen?

QuoteBill in NC
the current problem is that focusing on conspiracy theories could well cost them what they would otherwise gain in upcoming mid-term (or special) elections.

Hey, it's always worked for the Republicans.

And this conspiracy theory actually has some facts behind it!

I would further add that this shouldn't be relegated to the realm of conspiracy theories because there's some meat to it, in that the Republicans in power now are not doing anything to remove the sanctions against Russia that were put in place as a result.